0

Nielsen has been running some research into different demographics and their impact in the digital world, and their latest — quite possibly as a hat-tip to Mother’s Day this weekend — is a look at U.S. moms, a group that you might have assumed would be technical luddites, but actually are holding their own very well, thankyouverymuch.

It turns out that mothers are above average smartphone users, big fans of Facebook and Pinterest, and that the concept of a “mommy blogger” is actually a reality. The results also show that they are some of the most engaged consumers online.

Nielsen says that some 54 percent of U.S. moms are using smartphones: considering that the U.S. population this last month just tipped 50 percent for smartphone ownership (50.4 percent to be exact) that means that mothers have above-average smartphone ownership.

When it comes to social network usage, they are equally active. Some 75 percent of mothers use Facebook, and more than one-third of Pinterest’s monthly audience, or around five million users, is made up of mothers. That works out to mothers being 61 percent more likely than an average consumer to visit Pinterest, notes Nielsen. At least some of this active usage of social media is down to that heavy mobile usage: Nielsen also notes that over half of mothers’ social media use is via mobile devices, compared to 37 percent in the general population.

It also turns out that mothers are not just consumers of content but creators as well (we’re so creative, moms). Nielsen says that of all the bloggers in the U.S. roughy one in three is a mother. That helps contribute to another interesting fact: 52 percent of all bloggers in the U.S. are parents with young kids still living at home.

They also engage a lot more online, it seems. In the last 30 days, Moms were 38 percent more likely than average consumers to become fans of a brand or follow it online. And they were much more avid e-tailers: 35 percent were more likely to shop for clothes online; 50 percent more likely to buy toys, 29 percent more likely to buy music and 23 percent more likely to purchase e-books.

If anything, that seems to indicate that there is an opportunity for e-commerce companies to expand what they do online to target mother consumers. In the UK, online grocery shopping is a huge business (it’s the only way I “shop” at grocery stores these days), but perhaps because that doesn’t seem to be as prevalent in the U.S., stats on that usage are not included in Nielsen’s findings.